Dario Gabbai

David Dario Gabbai (born September 2, 1922) is a Greek Sephardi Jew and Holocaust survivor, notable for his role as a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz. He was deported to the camp in March 1944 and put to work in one of the crematoria at Birkenau, where he was forced to assist in the burning of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews that were deported to the camp during the spring and summer of that year.

Gabbai remained at Auschwitz until its evacuation in January 1945. He was liberated from Ebensee concentration camp in Austria by the United States Army, and has publicly spoken about what he witnessed and experienced during the Holocaust. He is among the last remaining survivors of the Sonderkommando.

Gabbai was born in Thessaloniki to a Greek mother and an Italian father, and was educated in Italian schools in Greece. At the age of 21 or 22 years old, Gabbai and his entire family were detained by the Nazis on March 24, 1944, and on April 1 they were sent to Auschwitz in cattle wagons. Ten days later, this transport arrived at the Judenrampe outside Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they faced the selection process. With the exception of Gabbai himself, his brother, and two of his cousins (brothers Maurice and Shlomo Venezia), the entire family were selected for extermination and gassed the same day. Gabbai watched his parents being loaded onto the trucks that would take them to the crematoria and gas chambers.

Gabbai was registered into the camp as prisoner 182568. Gabbai and the three other young men were selected to be Sonderkommandos and quarantined in Block 13 (known as the Sonderkommando-Block) in the men's camp of Birkenau for approximately 1 month.

Gabbai was taken to Crematorium II. As a member of the Sonderkommando, he found himself the closest to the extermination process. He states he was one of 35 Greek men selected for the Sonderkommando and was with his cousins and brother the whole time.

Gabbai's duties included helping the men, women and children selected for gassing to get undressed, moving their dead bodies out of the gas chamber onto an electric lift which would bring them up to the ground floor where the ovens were located, and loading the bodies into the muffles. While helping those selected to get undressed, one of the Sonderkommando members' duties was to maintain the pretence that they would merely be showered. Gabbai said that there were instances where the victims knew that something was suspicious about their fate, that "something funny was going on", but nothing could be done. In one instance, Gabbai recognized two of his friends from Thessaloniki, explained to them the reality of what was going to happen, and told them where to stand in the gas chamber so that they would be killed as quickly as possible. Gabbai heard children and their mothers crying and scratching the walls of the gas chamber as they died. Once the killing was over, the ventilation system extracted the gas, and then the door would be opened. Gabbai says that:

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